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Mozilla Reaction to U.S. vs. Google
Today the US Department of Justice (“DOJ”) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that it unlawfully maintains monopolies through anticomp
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 913 posts.
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A theory of Zoom fatigue
The Convivial Society: Dispatch No. 5
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Internet Users of All Kinds Should Be Concerned by a New Copyright Office Report
Outside of the beltway, people all over the United States are taking to the streets to demand fundamental change. In the halls of Congress and the White House, however, many people seem to think the biggest thing that needs to be restructured is the Internet. Last week, the president issued an...
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Important women in CS who aren't Grace Hopper (2018)
I’m tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace. Can’t we think of someone else for once? I went ahead and compiled a bunch of really important women according to some fairly arbitrary rules: There’s a specific thing you can point to and say “That. That’s their contribution.” This leaves…
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John Peel Sessions
Renowned Music Blogger, Dave Strickson, listens to some of the people that mattered in the history of music.
396
Campaign “Reclaim Your Face” Calls for a Ban on Biometric Mass Surveillance
Civil society across Europe launches the “Reclaim Your Face” campaign, demanding that local and national authorities listen to their communities about the serious risks of using facial recognition and other biometric technologies in public spaces. The newly formed coalition calls to ban biometric mass surveillance, in…
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How to effectively evade the GDPR and the reach of the DPA
Musings on Information Security and Privacy Risk Management - Thierry Zoller.
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Web Dark Ages
Old Web features — frontend and UI patterns
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Google Apple Contact Tracing (GACT): a wolf in sheep’s clothes?
I wrote a critical piece about the Google Apple Contact Tracing (GACT) platform a few days ago . This resulted in quite some discussion, which brought some more arguments to the fore, that I would like to address and clarify here. Here I focus on my area of expertise: privacy. My colleague Tamar Sharon wrote an…
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“This resentment runs deep and is stunningly widespread”
Link to: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/opinion/apple-app-store-hey.html
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Concerns with that Stanford antibody study of coronavirus prevalence
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
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GoDaddy and Felons.io – The life of an unregistered domain
GoDaddy never has and never will use customer search data to register domain names. Read on to learn more.
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From context collapse to content collapse
When social media was taking shape fifteen-odd years ago, the concept of “context collapse” helped frame and explain the phenomenon. Young scholars like Danah Boyd and Michael Wesch, bu…
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The Amish health care system
I. Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them? A reminder: the Amish are a German religious sect who immigrated to colon…
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TSA considers new system for flyers without ID
According to a solicitation to potential contractors published last week, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wants to outsource its current questioning of airline passengers without ID , and its decisions about which travelers without ID to allow to travel and which to prevent from flying , to a…
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A Failure, but Not of Prediction
I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This rai…
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On the destruction of America’s best high school
[C]hildren with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programs for the “gifted” are sometimes decried as “eli…
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Combating abuse in Matrix – without backdoors
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
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I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser
In Denmark it is possible to register domains with funny characters such as æ, ø and å. And we do. One prominent example is our national portal for booking Covid-19 tests at https://coronaprøver.dk . Wikipedia calls these beasts Internationalised domain names , so they must indeed exist.
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Portland passes low-density zoning reform
The reform sets a new standard: up to four homes on almost any lot, or up to six homes for price-regulated projects.
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Bitcoin is more like ham radio than the early internet
People in the bitcoin community often make fun of me as a nocoiner . That is, I don't have any bitcoins and am vocal about that fact. (Ne...
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Iceland radically cut teenage drug use
The relationship between people and the state has allowed an effective national programme to cut the rates of teenagers smoking and drinking to excess.
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RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps
This is a new series I’m going to start doing, much in the same spirit as YC’s Request for Startups . RFC doesn’t mean “ Request for Comments ” — although comments are of course welcome — but rather “Request for Co-founder.” RFC posts will be deep-dives on products and problems I find interesting or that I’m…
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Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports
The Japanese government seems incapable of getting their act together so that they can provide meaningful data to the public.
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Caltech Awards 10,000th PhD Degree
On Friday, October 30, Caltech conferred degrees on 51 graduate students by a vote of the Board of Trustees as part of a special allowance made for students impacted by coronavirus-related campus closures.